Madeleine L'Engle Quotes - Page 4

We all tend to make zealous judgments and thereby close ourselves off from revelation. If we feel that we already know something in its totality, then we fail to keep our ears and eyes open to that which may expand or even changes that which we so zealously think we know.

Maybe that's the best part of going away for a vacation-coming home again.

If we all knew each morning that there was going to be another morning, and on and on and on, we's tend not to notice the sunrise, or hear the birds, or the waves rolling into the shore. We'd tend not to treasure our time with the people we love. Simply the awareness that our mortal lives had a beginning and will have an end enhances the quality of our living. Perhaps it's even more intense when we know that the termination of the body is near, but it shouldn't be.

The discipline of creation, be it to paint, compose, write, is an effort towards wholeness.

Jesus, who comes across in the Gospels as extraordinarily strong, begged in the garden, with drops of sweat like blood running down his face, that he might be spared the terrible cup ahead of him, the betrayal and abandonment by his friends, death on the cross. Because Jesus cried out in anguish, we may too. But our fear is less frequent and infinitely less if we are close to the Creator. Jesus, having cried out, then let his fear go, and moved on.

I am slowly coming to understand with all my heart as well as my head that love is not a feeling. It is a person.

In my dreams, I never have an age.

Do you think things always have an explanation? "Yes. I believe that they do. But I think that with our human limitations we're not always able to understand the explanations. But you see, Meg, just because we don't understand doesn't mean that the explanation doesn't exist.

But when the world is, indeed, in chaos, then an affirmation of cosmos becomes essential.

We draw people to Christ not by loudly discrediting what they believe, by telling them how wrong they are and how right we are, but by showing them a light that is so lovely that they want with all their hearts to know the source of it.

We live by revelation, as Christians, as artists, which means that we must be careful never to get set into rigid molds. The minute we begin to think we know all the answers, we forget the questions, and we become smug like the Pharisee who listed all his considerable virtues and thanked God that he was not like other men.

Human beings are the only creatures who are allowed to fail. If an ant fails, it's dead. But we're allowed to learn from our mistakes and from our failures. And that's how I learn, by falling flat on my face and picking myself up and starting all over again.

The artist cannot hold back; it is impossible, because writing, or any other discipline of art, involves participation in suffering, in the ills and the occasional stabbing joys that come from being part of the human drama.

It's not my brain that's writing the book, it's these hands of mine.

But there is something about Time. The sun rises and sets. The stars swing slowly across the sky and fade. Clouds fill with rain and snow, empty themselves, and fill again. The moon is born, and dies, and is reborn. Around millions of clocks swing hour hands, and minute hands, and second hands. Around goes the continual circle of the notes of the scale. Around goes the circle of night and day, the circle of weeks forever revolving, and of months, and of years.

Lords of spirit, Lords of breath,Lords of fireflies, stars, and light,Who will keep the world from death?Who will stop the coming night?Blue eyes, blue eyes, have the sight.

Life, with its rules, its obligations, and its freedoms, is like a sonnet: You're given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself. - Mrs. Whatsit

You cannot see the past that did not happen any more than you can foresee the future.

It was the same way with silence. This was more than silence. A deaf person can feel vibrations. Here there was nothing to feel.

If it can be verified, we don't need faith... Faith is for that which lies on the other side of reason. Faith is what makes life bearable, with all its tragedies and ambiguities and sudden, startling joys.

Lords of space and Lords of time,Lords of blessing, Lords of grace,Who is in the warmer clime?Who will follow Madoc's rhyme?Blue will alter time and space.

It is ... through the world of the imagination which takes us beyond the restrictions of provable fact, that we touch the hem of truth.

Lords of blue and Lords of gold,Lords of wind and waters wild,Lords of time that's growing old,When will come the season mild?When will come blue Madoc's child?

Story always tells us more than the mere words, and that is why we love to write it, and to read it.

In the literary world today, Christianity has pretty well replaced sex as the present pet taboo, not only because Christianity is so often distorted by Christians as well as non-Christians, but because it is too wild and free for the timid.

One thing I have discovered since I've been ill, though, is that nobody ever knows anybody, and maybe least of all the people who are closest to them. Sort of a business of not being able to see the trees for the woods. We all live in isolated prisons of our own bodies and there's no real contact with any other human being. That's what sex is, in a way, isn't it, a desperate striving for contact? With which cheerful Thought for Today, I will bid you good afternoon.

Don't try to comprehend with your mind. Your minds are very limited. Use your intuition.

Some things have to be believed to be seen.

Pray all you like, ask anything you want, but don’t forget that he never promised he’d say yes. He never guaranteed us anything. Not anything at all. Except one thing. Just one thing . . . . That he cares . . . That is all. Nothing else.

At Tara in this fateful hour,I place all Heaven with its power,And the sun with its brightness,And the snow with its whiteness,And the fire with all the strength it hath,And the lightning with its rapid wrath,And the winds with their swiftness along their path,And the sea with its deepness,And the rocks with their steepness,And the earth with its starkness:All these I place,By God's almighty help and graceBetween myself and the powers of darkness!

I believe that every one of us here tonight has as clear and vital a vocation as anyone in a religiousorder. We have the vocation of keeping alive Mr. Melcher's excitement in leading young peopleinto an expanding imagination. Because of the very nature of the world as it is today our childrenreceive in school a heavy load of scientific and analytic subjects, so it is in their reading for fun,for pleasure, that they must be guided into creativity. These are forces working in the world asnever before in the history of mankind for standardization, for the regimentation of us all, orwhat I like to call making muffins of us, muffins all like every other muffin in the muffin tin.This is the limited universe, the drying, dissipating universe, that we can help our children avoidby providing them with “explosive material capable of stirring up fresh life endlessly.

If the artist reflects only his own culture, then his works will die with that culture. But if his works reflect the eternal and universal, they will revive.

Just because we don't understand doesn't mean that the explanation doesn't exist.

As Emmanuel, Cardinal Suhard says, "To be a witness does not consist in engaging in propaganda, nor even in stirring people up, but in being a living mystery. It means to live in such a way that one's life would not make sense if God did not exist.

I Name you Echthroi. I Name you Meg.I Name you Calvin.I Name you Mr. Jenkins.I Name you Proginoskes.I fill you with Naming.Be!Be, butterfly and behemoth,be galaxy and grasshopper,star and sparrow,you matter,you are,be!Be caterpillar and comet,Be porcupine and planet,sea sand and solar system,sing with us,dance with us,rejoice with us,for the glory of creation,seagulls and seraphimangle worms and angel host,chrysanthemum and cherubim.(O cherubim.)Be!Sing for the gloryof the living and the lovingthe flaming of creationsing with usdance with usbe with us.Be!"- Madeleine L'Engle, A Wind in the Door

Why does anybody do anything?" Mimi asked impatiently. "Most of the time we don't know--any of us.

If we commit ourselves to one person for life, this is not, as many people think, a rejection of freedom; rather, it demands the courage to move into all the risks of freedom, and the risk of love which is permanent; into that love which is not possession but participation.

Hate hurts the hater more'n the hated.

The child is aware of unlimited potential, and this munificence is one of the joys of creativity.Those of use who struggle in our own ways, small or great, trickles or rivers, to create, are constantly having to unlearn what the world would teach us...

Calvin said, "Do you know that this is the first time I've seen you without your glasses?""I'm blind as a bat without them. I'm near-sighted, like father.""Well, you know what, you've got dream-boat eyes," Calvin said. "Listen, you go right on wearing your glasses. I don't think I want anybody else to see what gorgeous eyes you have.

George MacDonald gives me renewed strength during times of trouble--times when I have seen people tempted to deny God--when he says, "The Son of God suffered unto death, not that men might not suffer, but that their sufferings might be like his.